Red and blue election maps

I thought I’d made my last election-related post for a few years, but here’s one more.

This is the red and blue 2008 election map we have gotten used to seeing for the past week.

Mark Newman, a pysicist at the University of Michigan made a collection interesting election maps using software called Cart. Cart produces density-equalizing maps or “cartograms” which scale regions according to some factor (such as population). Here is one example with voting results by county (more red means more republican, more blue means more democratic), scaled by population.

More maps for the 2008 election can be found here and maps from the 2004 election can be found here.